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"[M]etaphysical assertions [are] assertions which at once have objective reference to 'how things are' and yet are not empirically falsifiable as are the hypotheses of the special sciences. Such assertions cannot be thus falsifiable because their specific use or function is to represent not the variable details of our experience of reality, but its constant structure – that structure—that which all states of experience, regardless of their empirical contents, necessarily have in common. Thus, if a ... metaphysical assertion is false, this is not because it fails in predicting what is disclosed by our particular external perceptions, but because it misrepresents the common structure of all of our experiences, of which we are originally aware internally, and thus is falsified by any one of them we choose to consider" (RG [1966]: 93).

"[M]etaphysics [is] a distinct field of inquiry, whose task it is to raise to the level of reflective self-consciousness the fundamental assertions that must somehow be made by each of us and that none of us can meaningfully deny.

"The mark of such metaphysical assertions is that they are utterly positive or non-exclusive in their application through experience, hence true necessarily rather than contingently or empirically. Thus their negations or contradictories . . .are utterly negative or exclusive of application through experience and so are not merely false but necessarily false and possible at all only verbally. Of course, like science or any other inquiry purporting to lead to claims that are meaningful and true, metaphysics is subject to the two overriding demands that its terms and assertions be (1) logically consistent, both in themselves and in relation to one another, and (2) experientially significant, by applying somehow through our common human experience. Neither of these demands can be conceived as arbitrary in the sense of admitting of coherently conceivable alternatives; nor can either of them be restricted to some distinct field or fields of inquiry, thereby excluding other possible fields from its scope. The reason for this is that both demands arise from the very nature of cognitive meaning and thus constitute the unconditionally necessary conditions of any and all rational inquiry. One implication of this is particularly important: metaphysical terms and assertions – again assertions—again just like those of any other inquiry – must inquiry—must avoid vagueness or unclarity quite as much as they must avoid logical inconsistency and lack of application through experience. Since any term or assertion that is vague enough can always escape the verdict that it is inconsistent or not experientially significant, compliance with the demands of reason requires that its meaning be sufficiently clear so that its consistency and application through experience may be fairly determined.

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"If ... 'the intellect's self-understanding ... is the innate, a priori, or metaphysical,' ... then ... the statement 'I exist' must be a metaphysical statement, along with the other statements, 'The world exists' and 'God exists.' And, whatever may be true of the latter two statements (and certainly for classical as well as neoclassical theism the last is factually unfalsifiable sensu strictissimo), the first is evidently falsifiable, since it is true and can be true only contingently, even though it could never be even meaningful, much less true, to say of oneself, 'I do not exist.' In short, if metaphysics is defined as the human intellect's self-understanding, then metaphysics comprises contingent as well as necessary truths – although truths—although even the contingent truths it comprises are such that in one sense they cannot be coherently denied and, therefore, must be believed, if only implicitly or nonreflectively.

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'''Metaphysics in the broad sense,' on the other hand, should be taken to include, in addition to ontology, and hence also theology and cosmology, the third discipline of metaphysica specialis, psychology, or ... anthropology. As thus inclusive, metaphysics is integral existential truth. Conversely, integral existential truth necessarily includes metaphysics in the strict sense, as ontology and therefore theology and cosmology, even though metaphysics in the strict sense does not include anthropology, and hence is not the full truth about human existence – not existence—not even as such" (48).

"[T]here is evidently a whole class of assertions that intend, as merely mathematical and logical assertions hardly do, to assert something about existence, and thus are existential assertions, but nevertheless are not factual. I refer to the class of strictly metaphysical assertions, the chief defining characteristic of which is that, while they assert something to be existentially the case, they neither are nor could be factually falsifiable.

"Consider, for example, 'The universe exists,' which evidently intends to assert something about existence. What sense could it make to regard it as factual? If by 'universe' one means, as one should, 'everything there is,' then the universe, by definition, is unique; for if it includes everything there is, there can be no possibility of anything outside or alongside it. But in that case 'The universe exists' could not possibly be factually falsified. For if there cannot be even the possibility of a fact that would not be included in the universe – that universe—that being the very meaning of 'universe'-- then any even conceivable fact could only verify the assertion that the universe exists, and no fact, not even a conceivable fact, could ever falsify it.

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"1. To exist as a self at all is possible solely on the basis of faith, so that the statement,  'Unless you believe, you shall not understand,' is true in a sense not only of the Christian or of the religious believer but of every human being simply as such ...
"2. Philosophy in general is the fully reflective understanding of the basic existential faith that is constitutive of human existence ...
"3. The task of philosophical theology, which is integral to philosophy's central task as metaphysics, is so to understand our common faith as to answer the basic question of the reality of God ...
"4. Precisely as the task of an independent philosophy, philosophical theology is necessarily presupposed by a specifically Christian theology whose task is the fully reflective understanding of Christian faith" (OT [1986]: 69, 73, 78,84).

"[T]here is reason to hold that the philosophies of science, art, law, religion, etc., are all peripheral philosophical disciplines and are important, in the final analysis, only in relation to philosophy's central task of metaphysics ...

"Historically, metaphysics has been conceived from its beginnings as the noncompressible core of philosophy, understood as an absolutely basic and comprehensive science. As such, it eventually came to be differentiated into metaphysica generalis, or ontology, which is the understanding of the completely general features of reality, and metaphysica specialis, as comprising psychology, cosmology, and philosophical (or 'natural') theology, which are devoted respectively to understanding the three basic realities of the self, the world, and God. Needless to say, this conception of the exact scope and content of metaphysics reflects the material metaphysical conclusions of the main tradition of Western philosophy. But even in the case of philosophies which reject these conclusions – which conclusions—which deny, say, that God is ultimately real or else so radically reinterpret what 'God' means that philosophical theology is in effect reduced to cosmology or psychology – the psychology—the essential structure of metaphysical inquiry may still be readily discerned. It invariably involves the most basic and comprehensive questions that can occur to the human mind, and the procedure it follows in answering these questions always involves some form or other of the transcendental method, by which I mean simply the raising to full self-consciousness of the basic beliefs that are the necessary conditions of the possibility of our existing or understanding at all. In other words, metaphysics is the vital center of the entire critico-constructive undertaking that is philosophical reflection. It is for its sake, ultimately, that all the special philosophical inquiries exist for they are really so many contributions to its one central task: to reflect on the faith by which we live and in this way to understand the nature of reality as disclosed to this faith" (76 f.).

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"Furthermore, on a theistic view, neither the self nor the world is a metaphysical individual in the same sense that God is. To be sure, for a neoclassical theism, ... the world definitely is metaphysical, insofar as the reality of some world is no mere contingent fact but is a strictly general, and so necessary, feature of reality as such. But by 'world,' properly speaking, we refer not to an individual but to a collection of individuals, which is more than a mere collection without order or integrity, thanks only to the universal immanence of God as its sole primal source and final end. By 'self,' on the other hand, we do indeed refer to an individual that is unlike the world in being a concrete, integrated whole of reality, and to this extent an image or analogy of God. And yet the self is no more than God's image or analogy because its individuality, unlike God's, is not metaphysical in the sense of being ultimately constitutive of reality itself. True, the self is constitutive of our understanding of reality, insofar as it is in its basic existential faith alone that reality so presents itself that it can be understood, whether existentially or reflectively. To this extent, therefore, the self is an object of metaphysical reflection; and psychology (or, as we would no doubt say today, anthropology) is an integral metaphysical task along with theology and cosmology – as cosmology—as is evident from the fact that the self's denial of its own existence shares in the inescapable self-contradiction of all denials of
metaphysical truth" . Even so, the theistic view of the matter is that it belongs to the self's own essential self-affirmation to distinguish both itself and the world as but fragmentary parts of the one integral whole whose individuality alone suffices to constitute the very being of reality as such" (79 ff.)

"[M]etaphysics ... pursues the question of the ultimate whole of reality in Itself itself in abstraction from the question of the meaning of this reality for us" (110 f.).

"[T]he existential question to which any religion claims to represent the answer is the question of the meaning of ultimate reality for us. This means, first of all, that the reality about which it asks is the ultimate reality of our own existence in relation to others and the whole ... [W]hatever else we may or may not find ourselves obliged to take account of, we can never fail to take account somehow of ourselves, others, and the whole to which we all belong. In this sense, the threefold reality of our existence simply as such is the ultimate reality that we all have to allow for in leading our own individual lives. But if this reality is what the existential question asks about, the second thing to note is how it does this – namelythis—namely, by asking about this reality, not in its structure in itself, but in its meaning for us. This implies that in asking about ultimate reality, the existential question asks, at one and the same time, about our authentic self-understanding, about the understanding of ourselves in relation to others and the whole that is appropriate to, or authorized by this ultimate reality itself.

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"This means, of course, that, by the very nature of the existential question, there are also two main aspects to the procedures appropriate to determining the truth of specific religious answers to it ... [W]hether, or to what extent, a specific religious answer is [true] can be determined only by verifying its necessary implications, ethical as well as metaphysical. If it is true, its implications also must be true; and unless they can be verified by procedures appropriate to ethical and metaphysical claims respectively, it cannot be verified, either" (TR [1992]: 16-19).

"[T]here is more than one kind of question about God that human beings may be concerned to ask and answer by what they think, say, and do. Of course, any way of asking about God is a way of asking about something real beyond ourselves and the other persons and things that make up the world around us. In fact, in radically monotheistic religions such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the term 'God' refers to the strictly ultimate reality that is the necessary condition of the possibility not only of ourselves and the world, but of anything whatever that is so much as conceivable. But characteristic of these religions precisely as religions is that they ask about this strictly ultimate reality not merely abstractly, in its structure in itself, but rather concretely, in its meaning for us. In other words, in asserting that God is the strictly ultimate reality, these religions not only answer the question of who God is, but at the same time also address the question of who we ourselves are supposed to be in relation to this strictly ultimate reality. By contrast, metaphysics asks about God, insofar as it does so, in pursuit of its rather different, if by no means unrelated, kind of question. While it, too, asks about the strictly ultimate reality that theistic religions understand as God, it does so nonexistentially, by abstracting from the meaning of this reality for us so as to inquire simply into its structure in itself. In this respect, metaphysics is much more like science than religion, although the reality about whose structure it inquires abstractly is the same reality about which religion asks concretely – namelyconcretely—namely, the ultimate reality of our own existence in relation to others and the strictly ultimate.

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"Significantly, it is this threefold differentiation of ultimate reality into self, others, and the whole – or whole—or self, world, and God – that God—that underlies the understanding of metaphysics that has been conventional in the Western tradition since at least the seventeenth century. In this understanding, the scope of metaphysics includes both metaphysica generalis, or ontology, understood as critical reflection on strictly ultimate reality as such; and metaphysica specialis, comprising the three disciplines of psychology, cosmology, and theology, understood as critical reflection respectively on the three ultimate realities of self, world, and God.

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"Provided metaphysics is understood as it should be – as be—as critical reflection on our at least implicit understanding as human beings of ultimate reality, in the sense of the necessary conditions of the possibility of our own existence and all existence – it existence—it is clear that any properly existential assertion, including any assertion of Christian faith, both implies and, to an extent, is implied by the truth of certain properly metaphysical assertions. It implies the truth of some such assertions simply because it is existential and as such has to do with the ultimate reality of our own existence and of all that our existence necessarily presupposes. Consequently, even though it itself asserts something about the meaning of this reality for us, not about the structure of this reality in itself, it nevertheless implies certain assertions about this structure that have to be true metaphysically if it is to be true existentially.

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"In its other aspect, which I distinguish as moral, the existential question asks about how we are to understand ourselves authentically, or realistically, in accordance with the ultimate reality of our existence. Thus, while it is distinct from the proper question of morals in asking about our self-understanding, rather than about our life-praxis, how we are to act and what we are to do, the two questions, once again, are nonetheless closely related, because the answer we give to one of them sets definite limits to how we have to answer the other if we are to avoid self-contradiction. Either leading our lives in one way rather than another is how we ought to act in relation to others or else ultimate reality cannot implicitly authorize the self-understanding that a certain answer to the existetial existential question explicitly authorizes. Conversely, if leading our lives in a certain way is the way we ought to lead them, the self-understanding that a certain answer explicitly authorizes as authentic cannot be inconsistent with this rather than some other way's being the right way for us to lead our lives.

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"But if professional philosophers are well positioned to provide just such a formal analysis, this is not the only point at which they can be of particular help. Philosophy is more than analysis of meaning, and in its other main aspect, it has the task of critically validating all the different answers to the existential question, implicit as well as explicit, so as to formulate its own constructive answer to this question-indirectly question—indirectly at the level of critical reflection and solely on the basis of common human experience and reason. In this aspect of her or his work, however, the professional philosopher does exactly what anyone who lives the religious life today also has to do, either professionally or as a lay person, to make good on the claim that this particular way of living is not only appropriate but credible. For if this way of living is really credible, it can only be because what it represents as the truth about human existence is the same truth that the professional philosopher bears particular responsibility for critically validating by verifying its necessary presuppositions and implications, both metaphysical and moral" (30 f.).

"[A] third change in my thinking ... was in my understanding of metaphysics ... I have always been concerned with critically validating the metaphysical beliefs necessarily implied by Christian faith. But the only way in which these beliefs can be validated as credible on the basis of common human experience and reason is in terms of an independent secular metaphysics. Having become convinced already as a graduate student that the classical metaphysics presupposed by traditional theology was no longer tenable, I had looked for the metaphysics I needed in certain forms of revisionary, more exactly, neoclassical metaphysics. The more I tried to work with them, however, the clearer it became to me that even these forms of neoclassical metaphysics were open to a decisive objection. Like all other forms of what I eventually came to distinguish as 'categorial metaphysics,' they, too, depended on imaginatively generalizing categories ordinarily used in thinking and speaking about some things into metaphysical analogies supposedly applying to all things. The problem with this supposition, however, is that there is simply no way of distinguishing other than verbally between a so-called metaphysical analogy and a merely symbolic or metaphorical use of the category in question. Consequently, while I am still convinced that an independent secular metaphysics – special metaphysics—special as well as general including theology along with cosmology and anthropology – is anthropology—is a necessary condition of theology's critically validating the claim of Christian witness to be theoretically credible, I no longer understand metaphysics in the same way. On the contrary, I now hold that the metaphysics theology has need of is no form of the categorial metaphysics of most philosophical tradition, but only a neoclassical form of what I call 'transcendental metaphysics,' by which I mean the kind of metaphysics that, having dispensed with all forms of metaphysical analogy, at last completes the process of demythologizing metaphysics" ("Toward Bearing Witness" [1997]: 339).